Family Night Magic

Before General Conference in November I read a big blog post about ideas for making conference more meaningful. One that caught my attention was the mother who said that she purchased a copy of the conference Ensign and a highlighter for each of her children. She said that every week for Family Home Evening they read and discussed one talk from conference. She said that even her little kids got to have a copy, and that they colored in it with their highlighters and that was ok with her because she wanted them to be involved in the activity.

I thought this sounded like a great idea, and went online to the distribution center website and ordered 6 more copies of the conference Ensign.

Conference came and went, and it was weeks before my extra issues arrived. By then we were in the midst of Christmas madness and I had no time to think about Family Home Evenings involving anything other than Christmas.

This morning I started thinking about what to do for family night tonight. I wasn't in the mood to prepare a lesson, and as I walked through my bedroom I saw the stack of magazines sitting on the floor. "Sure," I thought, "Why not."

I wondered, though, how this idea would be received.

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I should have realized that any idea accompanied by highlighters for everyone had a high probability of success. What I was not expecting was the response from the little kids.

I decided that we would start with Elder Holland's impassioned talk about the Book of Mormon. We each took turns reading a paragraph, and after each paragraph I explained what it meant to the little kids. When he mentioned the allegory at the beginning of the Book of Mormon and said that Sister Dibb had talked about it in the morning session of conference, we turned back a few pages and read several paragraphs from her talk. (And talked about how cool it was that Sister Dibb was in one of the other Durham wards this weekend, visiting her son & his wife.)

We ended up reading the first page of Elder Holland's talk, and then deciding it was time for bed. The girls were sitting close to me and I could seem them highlighting a line or two of text from time to time. As we finished and knelt down for prayer, Jared was still marking rather vigorously with his highlighter. When he finished and set his copy of the magazine down, he said in a serious voice, "Mom, I just loved this talk." He had highlighted the entire page.

I am blown away. Why has it never occurred to me before to go through the conference talks (later) and explain what they mean to my little kids? I have no idea. But I am grateful tonight to whoever's idea that was, and excited for family nights to come...

dessert was ginormous chocolate chip cookies...yum!